BIO

Joey Carducci is a filmmaker, activist, 16mm film lab faculty advisor, visiting instructor and assistant lab manager in the Film/Video Department at Pratt Institute. His first film, STONE WELCOME MAT, premiered at the Venice Film Festival while he was a film student at California College of Arts and Crafts in 2003. That same year they decided to cut the “Crafts” out of their name, but he refuses to cut the craft out of filmmaking. Carducci continues to shoot on his Bolex, hand-process in his kitchen, tape splice on his Steenbeck, and find ways to do almost every step of the filmmaking process himself, as he did when he worked in professional photochemical film labs. Film is not dead yet, it is in the hands of the artists.

To make 16mm films and filmmaking more accessible, Carducci is the faculty advisor for 16mm Film Lab, a student club at Pratt offering free film screenings and resources inspired by the class he has taught, The Material of Film.

Carducci’s handmade films incorporate the materiality of queer experimental 16mm filmmaking through the theory and practice of self-reflexivity. His work acknowledges itself and the viewer, challenging the mandatory narrative by exposing the process to create awareness and resistance in content and form. He is committed to addressing his own white, transmasculine and class privilege at the intersections of injustice within and beyond the film frame and the gates of Pratt. While 16mm film is his chosen art and craft, he admits that his media activism is conducted primarily on his smartphone, featured in his ongoing project Civil Imagination in Practice: Copwatching as an Oppositional Gaze.

Secret details have finally been revealed and his new film COMING OUTTAKES is in progress. In the summer of 2016, his film GENERATIONS (2010), a collaboration with lesbian experimental filmmaking pioneer, Barbara Hammer, screened at the Museum of Arts and Design in a Canyon Cinema program titled Secession: The Decay of Patriarchy. He made a coming out video to share with Hammer that day and then came out as trans to the audience later that night.

In this feminist context, he announced that his new film will be shot on black and white handmade emulsion which he will make himself, in the chemistry lab at Pratt. COMING OUTTAKES will incorporate some of Hammer’s color negative outtakes from her 1995 film, TENDER FICTIONS, to extend the critique and performance of masculinity to include the complexity and tension between transmasculinity and feminism, lesbian transphobia and trans femmephobia, transfeminism, transmisogyny, and the reign of patriarchy, blame and shame that divides us. The feminist critiques of masculinity will be scathing, and the handmade emulsion will be scalding.

Joey (formerly Gina) Carducci’s coming out video, A VIDEO LETTER TO BARBARA HAMMER, screened as a work in progress at Anthology Film Archives in March 2017 as a part of NEW YORK FEMINIST FILM WEEK, following a FEMINIST FILM GENEALOGIES ROUNDTABLE and a screening of ALL THAT SHELTERING EMPTINESS (2010), his film made in collaboration with award-winning queer author/activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Carducci is co-curating an ongoing, quarterly Transgender Film Series, The Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film, at Anthology Film Archives, inaugurated in April 2017 with an upcoming series in March 2019. Planning his 16mm film, COMING OUTTAKES, has inspired him to create a new trans film theory as a part of his Masters’ Thesis in the Graduate Program in Media Studies to be revealed at Pratt Institute this spring.

His films have screened, by invitation, at Brooklyn Museum, Havana Film Festival, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinematheque and Tate Modern, among others. Publications include: Films for the Feminist Classroom, Make/shift, Maximum RocknRoll, Queer Moving Images and the Fragility and Temporality of their Existence. Distribution: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Canyon Cinema, Filmmakers Coop. Awards: Black Maria Film and Video Festival’s Directors Choice Award; Special Jury Award, Side by Side LGBT International Film Festival, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the Berlinale for collaboration with Barbara Hammer.